Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before you’ve had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.
The seven hour explosion nobody could explain
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Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and X, are accessed daily by millions of people worldwide. In the weeks or months leading up to elections, many political parties use social media platforms as part [...]
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During the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5, 2026, Paula White-Cain, senior adviser to the White House Office of Faith, introduced President Donald Trump as “the greatest champion of faith that we have ever had [...]
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In a new analysis, racial and ethnic disparities in fatal shootings of U.S. residents by police varied widely between states. Roland Neil of the RAND Corporation in California, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in [...]
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The news media is shaping reproductive narratives and stigma around childlessness, presenting it as a threat to national interests, a deviation from moral or cultural norms, as a risk and, sometimes, as a legitimate life [...]
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The climate measures currently in place are unlikely to meet Paris Climate Agreement targets. Whether further political measures can move us closer to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees and combating climate [...]
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Texas busing programs that transported newly arrived immigrants to Democratic-led cities boosted President Donald Trump’s vote share in affected counties during the 2024 election, according to a new study from the USC Price School of [...]
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Indigenous people in the United States are at higher risk of fatal police violence in and around American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) reservations, according to the first comprehensive national study on the subject from researchers at [...]
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The growing use of AI-generated scientific and science-related content, especially on social media, raises important concerns: these texts may contain false or highly persuasive information that is difficult for users to detect, potentially shaping public [...]
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The Doomsday Clock—a symbolic device to signal an array of existential threats to the world since 1947—was recently moved to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to midnight. And that was [...]
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During armed conflicts in Latin America, state forces, insurgents, and paramilitaries systematically employed massacres, torture, abductions, and targeted killings to dismantle social structures. The Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la [...]
